Selling democracy to the plutocrats: Editorial

Very rich people in America, of whom there are more every day, can buy most anything they want, and more power to them.

But should they be able to buy elections?

The prevailing view in this country since at least the long-ago days of the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms is that they should not be able to do so. Reasonable, and actually very flexible, monetary limits were placed on what people could give to candidates and to campaigns. Loopholes through which a Mack truck could be driven, mostly having to do with funneling the millions through organizations rather than individuals, have continued to make politics hardly an underfunded business throughout the land. Excess and individualism is in our DNA. Still, it was nice to know that in theory at least there was some governance on the riches flowing to those who would govern us.

Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, however, including Citizens United, which defined corporations as people and therefore imbued with the rights of “free speech” that the court says includes the right to give money to politicians, have increasingly taken us back to the free-for-all pre-Watergate electoral times.

Tuesday, in a case called McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court on a 5-4 vote ditched most limits on the aggregate amounts people can donate to candidates, political parties and political committees.

Until this week, Americans of means were limited to writing political checks totalling $123,000 in a two-year election cycle. Now, according to an analysis by the good-government group Public Citizen, an individual could write a single check for up to $5.9 million in that cycle. That’s a whopper.

We don’t think the worry that this could take us in the political direction of a Russia — a country run by plutocrats, not the people — is an exaggerated one. Justice Stephen Breyer took the extraordinary step of reading his 30-page dissent from the bench: “Today’s decision eviscerates our nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve,” he said.

Do Americans really want to live in a pre-Watergate, pro-plutocrat political world? Unless they speak out, that’s the bill of goods they were just sold.